My Name is Asher Lev: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Asher Lev introduces himself as “the Asher Lev […] the notorious and legendary Lev of the Brooklyn Crucifixion.” He is also “an observant Jew.” And observant Jews, he says, don’t paint crucifixions—or paint at all, for that matter.

Because of this double identity, much is being written and said about Asher Lev: “myths are being generated: I am a traitor, an apostate […] a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians.” He is none of these things. And yet, at the same time, “I am indeed, in some way, all of those things.”

Asher says that “gossip, rumors, mythmaking […] are not appropriate vehicles for […] nuances of truth.” So it’s time for him to offer a defense, “a long session in demythology.” But it won’t be an apology, because “it is absurd to apologize for a mystery.” It’s a mystery because there was no indication in Asher’s family background that he would be born with “a unique and disquieting gift.”

Asher’s father’s family traces back to the 1300s in Europe. His father’s great-great-grandfather had been the manager of the estates of “a carousing Russian nobleman” who, in a fit of drunkenness, burned down a village and killed people. In connection with this story, Asher always heard, “You see how a goy behaves […] The people of the sitra achra behave this way.” Jews do not.

Asher’s ancestor had transformed the Russian nobleman’s estates into immense wealth for both himself and the nobleman. But in middle age, he began to travel. Asher’s father always told him that his ancestor did this in order to “bring the Master of the Universe into the world.” His mother told him it was so that his ancestor could “find people in need and […] comfort and help them.”

Asher heard about this ancestor so often that he began to appear in Asher’s dreams: “a man of mythic dimensions” who “left a taste of thunder in my mouth.” In these dreams, Asher’s mythic ancestor would echo his father’s questions about Asher’s childhood love of drawing.

Asher’s grandfather, after whom he is named, was a scholar and recluse. By the age of 20, he had become known as a genius. Shortly before the age of 50, he became a member of the “Russian Hasidic sect led by the Rebbe of Ladov” and begun to travel around the Soviet Union as an emissary of that Rebbe. One night, while traveling home from the Rebbe’s synagogue, a drunken peasant killed him with an axe. It was the night before Easter.

Asher’s mother is descended from a different Eastern European Hasidic family, all of them great scholars. Asher himself, born in 1943 to Rivkeh and Aryeh Lev in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, “was the juncture point of two significant family lines […] freighted with Jewish responsibility. But he was also born with a gift.”

Asher remembers drawing at four years old—covering paper, margins of books, and bare walls with drawings. From his earliest days, he also remembers his neighborhood along the Brooklyn Parkway and the people he would watch on the street. He grew up “encrusted with lead and spectrumed with crayons.”

When Asher was growing up, his mother had seemed more like an older sister; she was just 19 when he was born. They were happy days filled with laughter. Sometimes Asher and his mother would go rowing together in Prospect Park. Once Asher drew a picture of his mother after she fell in their boat while awkwardly pulling at the oars. Rivkeh told Asher that it wasn’t nice or respectful to draw her like that. But she praised his creativity otherwise.

In the days before Asher’s mother became ill, his father traveled a lot, meeting with government representatives at the request of the Rebbe. Aryeh had come to America at 14 and had earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science at the Rebbe’s request. Rivkeh takes great pride in Aryeh’s work, and Aryeh takes pride in continuing the work his own father had done for the Rebbe’s father. Sometimes Aryeh would leave early in the morning, after preparing a glass of fresh orange juice for each member of the family. “Have a safe journey,” Rivkeh would always tell him. Asher would watch  him out the window—tall, neatly dressed, and walking with a slight of limp from childhood polio.

Asher often drew his father praying. Sometimes they would talk about Aryeh’s studies of the holy books. One day, Aryeh explains a passage from the Talmud which says that if someone causes a single person to perish, it’s as if he has killed a whole world. Aryeh explains that it’s as if that person has killed all the descendants that might have come from the deceased person. He explains to Asher that his own father had often studied this passage, too.

Once, Aryeh tells Asher, who is almost five, that he shouldn’t spend so much time on drawing. He calls it “foolishness.” He thinks Asher will outgrow drawing in time. Asher continues to draw his father, especially pictures of his father weeping as he sings his own father’s haunting hymn melody. But Asher no longer shows his father these pictures.

Asher vaguely remembers the January week that his mother was taken to the hospital; he was six. There had been a phone call, and his mother had begun screaming. The apartment had filled with relatives and friends. Asher had hidden in his room, not knowing what was happening to Rivkeh. She only quieted when the Rebbe came to the apartment. Later, Asher learned that his Uncle Yaakov, his mother’s brother, had been killed in a car accident in Detroit, while traveling for the Rebbe. Yaakov was only 27, a gentle man. He had been studying Russian affairs in order to become an adviser to the Rebbe.

Two days later, Rivkeh is taken to the hospital. Asher remembers the “unearthly” sound of Aryeh singing his father’s melody that Shabbos. Late that night, Asher hears his father singing the melody again while standing at their living room window. He vividly remembers the sight of his father, quietly, fervently singing in his pajamas in the dim light.

After Rivkeh comes home from the hospital, Aryeh stops traveling. A Yiddish-speaking widow named Mrs. Rackover starts coming to the apartment to clean and cook. Rivkeh was “almost destroyed” by Yaakov’s death. Afterward, she is almost unrecognizably thin, and her eyes look dead. She avoids everyone. Asher hears her talking to herself, and it frightens him. He hears her singing a Hasidic melody in her brother’s voice.

One day, Rivkeh shows a flicker of recognition and asks Asher if he is drawing “sweet, pretty things.” Actually, he’s drawing “twisted shapes, swirling forms,” but he agrees to “make the world pretty” by drawing his mother flowers and birds.

About two weeks after Rivkeh’s return home, Asher finds her lying in bed, looking “shrunken” and “sallow.” He’s come to show her his drawing of two birds in a nest, but she doesn’t respond when he tells her, “I made the world pretty, Mama.” Mrs. Rackover finds Asher and scolds him for disturbing his mother. Later, Asher sits at his desk and makes a drawing of dead birds.

At one point, Rivkeh’s sister, Leah, comes to visit and tells her she is neglecting Asher and that the Torah forbids her to mourn in this way. Rivkeh says nothing. Aryeh begins taking Asher to work with him during the day. Aryeh works at the Ladover headquarters, a Gothic building containing a publishing press and conference rooms. The Rebbe and his wife also live there, in a second-floor apartment. Asher is curious to visit the Rebbe like so many others do, but he isn’t allowed. His father works in a small third-floor office. He often sits reading newspapers or talking on the phone. Asher often hears him speaking about Russia.

Asher isn’t sure what his father’s telephone calls are about. Aryeh sometimes speaks in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, or French. At the end of a workday, he looks weary and complains that he needs people, not telephones. One day he tells Asher that he’s helping Ladover families to move from Europe to the United States.

Late one afternoon, Aryeh takes a phone call. His face becomes rigid with anger, and his voice is filled with “cold rage.” Asher doesn’t recognize the language Aryeh speaks into the phone. Later, Aryeh tells Asher that he’d been speaking Russian. The man on the telephone told him that people in Russia are harming Jews. That night, Aryeh tries to get Rivkeh to eat supper with them, but she refuses. Later, Asher is awakened by the sound of his father softly chanting Psalms in front of the living room window.

The next day, there are more tense phone calls in Russian. Aryeh paces around his office, restless. Asher shows Aryeh a drawing he’s made of him talking angrily in Russian. Aryeh looks at the drawing but doesn’t say anything. At supper that night, Asher tells Rivkeh about the drawing. When Rivkeh asks if it was a pretty drawing, Asher replies, “No, Mama. But it was a good drawing.” He explains that he doesn’t want to make pretty drawings.

Rivkeh’s eyes narrow, and she whispers to Asher that he “should make the world pretty.” Asher replies that the world isn’t pretty, so he “won’t draw it pretty.” His mother tells him that it’s wrong to “dislike God’s world. Even if it is unfinished.”

Asher keeps asking his mother when she’s going to get well. The next thing he knows, he feels “something tearing wide apart” inside him, and he is screaming and beating his fists on the table. Someone puts him to bed. When he wakes up later, his father is standing there. Asher sleepily tells Aryeh, “My drawings don’t help […] It’s not a pretty world, Papa.” “I’ve noticed,” his father tells him.

Aryeh’s brother, Asher’s Uncle Yitzchok, comes to visit. He owns a successful jewelry and watch-repair store in Brooklyn and has several children. He invites the family to his house for Passover, but Aryeh explains that Rivkeh can’t leave the house. Asher’s uncle tells Aryeh he should talk to the Rebbe. Aryeh asks Asher to leave the room. In his bedroom, Asher draws pictures of his kindly uncle. When his uncle sees the pictures, he calls Asher “a little Chagall.” He explains that Chagall is the world’s greatest Jewish artist. The world’s greatest artist, he says, is Picasso. He asks to buy one of Asher’s drawings. Aryeh’s face darkens at this, and after Yitzchok leaves, Aryeh returns with the drawing, saying that his brother “has a strange sense of humor.” Asher isn’t sure if he feels happy or sad to have the drawing back.

As spring progresses, Asher sometimes spends whole days sitting in the living room with his mother and watching the sunlight change as it moves across the room. One day, Asher struggles to capture the contours of his mother’s face in a drawing. He uses the ashes from her old cigarettes to get the contours just right. Later, he notices his father watching him with “fascination and perplexity,” looking “angry and confused and dejected” at the same time.

That night, Aryeh tells Asher that he wishes he wouldn’t spend all his time drawing. He asks Asher who taught him to use cigarette ash. Asher explains that he came up with the idea himself. He apologizes for making Aryeh angry with him. Aryeh just tells Asher to say his bedtime prayer and bids him goodnight. That night, Asher dreams of his mythic ancestor, raging and storming, telling Asher he’s “wasting time.” Asher wakes up and sees his father praying in front of the window. He vows to himself that through his drawing, he will “bring life to all the wide and tired world.”

One Sunday morning, Asher accompanies his father to the grocery store. He meets a nervous-looking man with a strange cap and a raspy voice, Reb Yudel Krinsky. He has just come from Russia, Aryeh explains. Aryeh asks Yudel Krinsky how he is feeling. “How should a Jew feel?” Yudel replies. “There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head.” Yudel tells Asher that his father is “an angel of God.”

After they leave the store, Aryeh explains to Asher that he helped Yudel come to America from Russia. His strange hat is called a kaskett. The Rebbe asked Yudel to continue wearing it “so everyone would see a Russian Jew who remained a Jew.” He tells Asher that Stalin is “from the sitra achra.” Later, Mrs. Rackover explains to Asher that Yudel had survived 11 years in Siberia, “a land of ice and darkness where the Russian government sends people it hates.”

As Asher eats the milk and cookies Mrs. Rackover has prepared for him, he wonders how Picasso might paint Siberia. It bothers him that he doesn’t know what color ice is. Later, he pictures Yudel Krinsky—“not truly his face, but the way I felt about his face.” He feels as though he and Yudel are brothers—Yudel knew ice and darkness in the past, outside  himself, and Asher knows ice and darkness now, inside himself.

That night, Rivkeh joins the family for supper. She asks Asher about his drawings. Then, she asks Aryeh, “What’s new in the world?” She tells him, “It is a victory for the sitra achra to leave a task for the Ribbono Shel Olom unfinished.” Later, Asher goes to his room and tries and fails to draw, “feeling the fear like a presence.” He goes to the living room and stares out the window. Aryeh finds him. Asher asks why God is doing this to his mama. Aryeh hugs Asher and puts him to bed.

The next day, Rivkeh sleeps all day. That night, she finds Asher and Aryeh in the living room and explains to them that she wants to finish Yaakov’s work. It would be a victory for the sitra achra, she says, if Yaakov’s work remained incomplete. Soon Asher will be starting yeshiva. Aryeh could travel again. She begs Aryeh to let her call the college tomorrow. Aryeh asks Rivkeh to wait until he’s spoken to the Rebbe. Rivkeh’s eyes darken again, and she says harshly, “The Rebbe killed my brother.” Aryeh and Asher are horrified.

Asher vividly remembers lying awake that night, feeling connected to his mother’s pain and hearing her angry words as if they were “demonic words, from the sitra achra.” He decides that drawing is “a futile indulgence in the face of such immutable darkness.” He must grow up.

The Rebbe gives his permission for Rivkeh to start college. In September, Asher enters the Ladover yeshiva, his mother enters Brooklyn College, and Aryeh begins traveling for the Rebbe once again. Asher quits drawing.